Echoes Of The Marseillaise

What was the French Revolution? Was it the triumph of Enlightenment humanist principles, or a violent reign of terror? Did it empower the common man, or just the bourgeoisie? And was it a turning point in world history, or a mere anomaly? E.J. Hobsbawm’s classic historiographic study—written at the very moment when a new set of revolutions swept through the Eastern Bloc and brought down the Iron Curtain—explores how the French Revolution was perceived over the following two centuries. He traces how the French Revolution became integral to nineteenth-century political discourse, when everyone from bourgeois liberals to radical socialists cited these historical events, even as they disagreed on what their meaning. And he considers why references to the French Revolution continued to inflame passions into the twentieth century, as a rhetorical touchstone for communist revolutionaries and as a boogeyman for social conservatives. Echoes of the Marseillaise is a stimulating examination of how the same events have been reimagined by different generations and factions to serve various political agendas. It will give readers a new appreciation for how the French Revolution not only made history, but also shaped our fundamental notions about history itself.

We can learn a great deal from studying the French Revolution itself, but we can also learn from studying the ways in which scholars have interpreted the French Revolution, and from the ways their views have changed. For over a century following the Revolution, commentators and scholars spoke of it in glowing terms. But in the past three decades, revisionist historians have become skeptical. Eric Hobsbawm reiterates the centrality of the Revolution for history on a global basis. He argues that those who wrote about the Revolution in the nineteenth century were convinced it had changed their lives dramatically, improving the economy and the lot of peasants. They saw the Revolution as a prototype of of the bourgeois revolution, enabling the middle class to gain power from the ruling class of aristocrats. Many believed proletarian revolutions would inevitably follow. In the years between 1917 and the 1960s, Marxists continued to use the French Revolution as a point of reference, paying increasing attention to the social and economic factors in the Revolution, not only to the political factors. In the 1970s and 1980s, many historians began to argue that the Revolution achieved modest results at disproportionate costs. Hobsbawm argues that this massive historiographical reaction against the centrality of the Revolution reflects the personal politics of those contemporary historians for whom Marxism and communism are now out of favor. They are, he maintains, wrong. The Revolution transformed the world permanently and introduced forces that continue to transform it.

Reassesses the role of revolution as a force that has shaped the development of world politics.

In the last generation the classic Marxist interpretation of the French Revolution has been challenged by the so-called revisionist school. The Marxist view that the Revolution was a bourgeois and capitalist revolution has been questioned by Anglo-Saxon revisionists like Alfred Cobban and William Doyle as well as a French school of criticism headed by François Furet. Today revisionism is the dominant interpretation of the Revolution both in the academic world and among the educated public. Against this conception, this book reasserts the view that the Revolution - the capital event of the modern age - was indeed a capitalist and bourgeois revolution. Based on an analysis of the latest historical scholarship as well as on knowledge of Marxist theories of the transition from feudalism to capitalism, the work confutes the main arguments and contentions of the revisionist school while laying out a narrative of the causes and unfolding of the Revolution from the eighteenth century to the Napoleonic Age.

The 1889 Exposition universelle in Paris is famous as a turning point in the history of French music, and modern music generally. This book explores the ways in which music was used, exhibited, listened to, and written about during the Exposition universelle. It also reveals the sociopolitical uses of music in France during the 19th century.

In Music and Cosmopolitanism, Cristina Magaldi examines music making in a past globalized world. This volume focuses on one city, Rio de Janeiro, and how it became part of a larger world through music and performance. Magaldi describes a process of creating connections beyond national borders, one that is familiar to contemporary city residents, but which was already dominant at the turn of the 20th century, as new technological developments led to alternative ways of making and experiencing music.

“An impressive contribution both to the history of ideas and to political philosophy.” —Alasdair MacIntyre, author of After Virtue Once of central importance to left historians and activists alike, recently the concept of the “bourgeois revolution” has come in for sustained criticism from both Marxists and conservatives. In this magisterial work, Neil Davidson offers theoretical and historical insights about the nature of revolutions. Through extensive research and comprehensive analysis, Davidson demonstrates that what’s at stake is far from a stale issue for the history books—understanding that these struggles of the past offer far-reaching lessons for today’s radicals. “A monumental work. Neil Davidson has given us what is easily the most comprehensive account yet of the ‘life and times’ of the concept of ‘bourgeois revolution’ [and] has also provided us with a refined set of theoretical tools for understanding the often complex interactions between political revolutions which overturn state institutions and social revolutions which involve a more thoroughgoing transformation of social relations.” —Colin Mooers, author of The Making of Bourgeois Europe “Davidson’s book is one of immense and impressive erudition. His knowledge of the history of Marxist theory and historiography is as detailed as it is comprehensive, and must be well-nigh unrivalled. The endless, complex debates that characterize the Marxist tradition are distilled with clarity and illumination.” —Times Literary Supplement “A brilliant and fascinating book, wide-ranging and lucidly written.” —Jairus Banaji, author of Theory as History

This book is a new account of the surrealist movement in France between the two world wars. It examines the uses that surrealist artists and writers made of ideas and images associated with the French Revolution, describing a complex relationship between surrealism's avant-garde revolt and its powerful sense of history and heritage. Focusing on both texts and images by key figures such as Louis Aragon, Georges Bataille, Jacques-André Boiffard, André Breton, Robert Desnos, Max Ernst, Max Morise, and Man Ray, this book situates surrealist material in the wider context of the literary and visual arts of the period through the theme of revolution. It raises important questions about the politics of representing French history, literary and political memorial spaces, monumental representations of the past and critical responses to them, imaginary portraiture and revolutionary spectatorship. The study shows that a full understanding of surrealism requires a detailed account of its attitude to revolution, and that understanding this surrealist concept of revolution means accounting for the complex historical imagination at its heart.